How a Restaurant Uses Quip

By Josh Weinstein

Ardesia is a casual food and wine bar located in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City and inspired by the neighborhood’s historic past and vibrant present. Damon Gravina and Mandy Oser discuss how Quip has helped them to manage their business.

Tell me about Ardesia. What is your team like?

We are a tight-knit, focused group with a shared passion for food, wine, and hospitality. We really do follow the “work hard, play hard” mantra. We have fun every day we come to work and feel like that directly transfers to our guests' experience. We want people to feel like this is an extension of their home… with a really killer wine cellar, of course.

How do you and your team use Quip?

When we say “a tight-knit, focused group”, what we really mean is SMALL. In order to deal with the gargantuan amount of information that comes at us each day, we really need a way to communicate quickly, efficiently, and (more and more frequently) from multiple locations. Also, the pace of our business never slows and come 5pm our doors open and the back-of-house work must stop. But we still need a way to capture information while we are on the go. Quip allows us to do that with its clean and simple mobile app.

What are the most useful features of Quip?

We are chronic, habitual, obsessed list makers. Quip feeds that habit in the healthiest way possible. The chat feature is a major email eliminator. Also, we have found that it's more about what ISN'T there…hear us out: The simplicity in the word processing allows our documents to focus on what is really important. When you take the clutter out, work and productivity increase.

Great example of the simplicity. A basic list of what wines I've ordered and when they are arriving so Damon can prepare and update the staff.

And this is an example of a collaborative list - this is our shared process for changing the wine list and it is a great tool for keeping us on track in what tends to be a complicated and multi-faceted process.

What did your process look like before using Quip? What about now?

So many emails! So many Google Docs! While we're still longing for what a Quip spreadsheet function may look like, we really have been able to streamline our tasking abilities. Chat has eliminated many emails… and linking to other documents has eliminated redundancy. The quick pdf/print feature is handy for easily and quickly printing out those lists we love so much.

Did anything surprise you about using Quip?

In an age of overly complex, endlessly configurable, hyper-formattable, needlessly distracting programs, Quip kept eliciting the same response over and over: It's so simple!

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